Decades of stringent regulations on Valley businesses have helped improve local air quality, said Seyed Sadredin, executive director of The San Joaquin County Air Pollution Control District.

San Joaquin County, like most in the Central Valley, is a tough air basin to keep clean, Sadredin said. Surrounded by hills and far enough inland to miss out on those coastal breezes, the Valley is, in some ways, “even worse than Los Angeles,” he added.

“Given the geography and stagnant weather conditions, cleaning the air here is tougher than in other places.”

Plus, as the state’s bread basket, agricultural polluters such as dairies and farms kick up a lot of chemicals and dirt in the air, Sadredin said. Since the early 1980s, the district has imposed regulations that required businesses to change their fleets, reduce mileage and restrict emissions in any other way possible.

“Basically, it’s like leaving no stone unturned,” he said.

Being recognized as a district that meets at least one federally mandated clean-air requirement will give the air district leverage to further regulate emissions, Sadredin said.

“Hopefully this will give us more credibility to regulate because people will see that what we have been doing is working,” he said.

Central Valley businesses will be required to spend $20 billion in pollution-cutting measures during the next 10 to 15 years.

“These plans are basically a recipe of commitment to Valley businesses for the next decade of so,” he said. “There’s no silver bullet to this. It’s just across-the-board regulations.”

Some of the most effective emissions-cutting measures taken have been to warn people no to burn fires in their fireplaces on certain days and to urge farmers to plot those back-and-forth trips on the field to save gas and kick less dust up in the air, said Don Hunsaker, an air quality specialist from the air district.

“What we’ve done in the past four years or so has had a tremendous effect,” he said.

Next, the district will need to tackle those finer-particle pollutants, Hunsaker said. The Central Valley drastically falls short of meeting federal clean-air requirements for smaller-particle and ozone pollution, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

But just because the Valley met one standard of three, that does not mean any standards will be relaxed, Sadredin stressed.

“This is just one thing,” he said. “We still have a lot to do.”

Emissions in the Valley have been cut by 80 percent since 1980, he said.

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